This article continues the series on 501 Queen car operations in November 2011 by looking at the level of service operated beyond common short turn points on the route. This should be read in conjunction with the previous articles on the route’s headways and running times.
The TTC has a target for headway “punctuality” of ±3 minutes of the scheduled value, and a target that this should be met 70% of the time. In practice, the space between many vehicles exceeds this target, sometimes quite substantially, but much is hidden by averaging of values over multiple locations, times and days. Riders, however, experience service at specific times and locations, and averages are cold comfort when they find themselves in the 30% of service that does not meet the target.
In the analysis of running times, it was clear that at certain times of certain days, the amount of time allocated for trips on the Queen route are somewhat less than the time a car actually needs to get from Neville to Humber or to Long Branch. This leads to spates of short-turning in an attempt to get cars back on time. Although the TTC’s target may be headway-based, its management tactics focus on preservation of schedules.
Readers of previous analyses will be familiar with plots of headway patterns, or rather the lack of pattern in many cases, shown as scatter diagrams of time of day versus headway for various locations. This is a bit abstract for some readers, and I have attempted to produce a simpler measure giving roughly the same information.
The amount of service, defined as capacity, can be simply expressed as the number of vehicles per hour that reach a point on a route. Ten cars an hour is twice the service of five cars an hour. What this measure loses is any sense of the regularity of service (something the article on headways addresses) because there is no definition of when those ten cars actually showed up. They could all come in a pack followed by a gap over 45 minutes long, but they would still be “10 cars per hour”. Such are the dangers of averaging data even at a more finely-grained level than is done in published statistics by the TTC.
However, for the purpose of this discussion, cars/hour does well enough to illustrate what riders on the line must put up with.
Service in The Beach
The following two sets of charts show the number of cars per hour for each direction on the east end of the route. There are separate pages with the data broken out by week of the month, and by day of the week. (It is possible to have fractional values because over one week, the number of cars in a given one-hour period may not be a multiple of the number of days in the week. This would only occur if the service were identical on each day included in a group.)
501_201111_East Queen Cars Per Hour Westbound
501_201111_East Queen Cars Per Hour Eastbound
Each chart is broken down by hour, and within each hour there are three bars showing the number of cars/hour at:
- Queen & Woodbine (cars originating at / bound for at Neville)
- Queen east of Coxwell (includes cars originating/turning at Woodbine Loop)
- Queen & Greenwood (includes cars originating/turning at Russell Carhouse)
In general, the number of cars/hour originating at Neville is lower than the values further west as more cars join the route. Differences arise from various factors:
- Cars that are short-turned only appear in the counts for locations west of the turnback point.
- Observations are at each location, the number of cars per hour at each location may differ slightly even without short turns. A car crossing Woodbine Avenue at 6:59 westbound will count in the 7:00 to 8:00 total at locations further west.
On weekdays westbound, the service east of Woodbine Loop is only slightly worse than the service to the west indicating that there are few short turns. However, immediately after the AM peak, in the 9:00 to 10:00 range on most days, the cars/hour value for Neville (blue bar) drops relative to Woodbine (purple bar) showing the effect of short-turns to straighten out the service following the peak. This pattern continues through the mid-day.
One notable exception is Week 4 when new schedules with added running time for a construction diversion were in place, but the diversion had not actually started. During this period, the number of short turns dropped quite noticeably compared with other weeks.
The charts by day of the week show some differences for weekdays, but the real change comes on Saturdays. From the running time analysis, it was clear that schedules on Saturday afternoons did not provide enough time for cars to make their round trips. Although more frequent service is scheduled, the actual level of service at Neville falls off beginning at 2:00 pm and never really recovers even into the evening.
Sunday afternoons show a similar pattern, but it is correct by about 8:00 pm. (Note that this data include the Santa Clause parade’s effect on Sunday, November 20, but this does not explain all of the short-turning if one examines the data day-by-day.)
The eastbound chart shows similar information, but for eastbound service which is of particular interest to PM peak and evening riders.
Again, I must caution that the numbers here are averages over one-hour periods with data from 3-to-5 days included on each chart. This can mask a worse distribution of actual data for individual days and times.
Service to Humber and Long Branch
The following charts show comparable data for the west end of the Queen route.
501_201111_West Queen Cars Per Hour Westbound
501_201111_West Queen Cars Per Hour Eastbound
Each chart is broken down by hour, and within each hour there are four bars showing the number of cars/hour at:
- Lake Shore east of Long Branch Loop (cars originating at / bound for Long Branch)
- Lake Shore & Royal York (includes cars originating at / bound for Kipling Loop)
- The Queensway east of Humber Loop (includes cars originating at / bound for Humber)
- Queen at Triller Avenue (just east of Roncesvalles; includes cars originating at / bound for Roncesvalles Carhouse or Sunnyside Loop)
Unlike the east end of the line, the west end has a scheduled service that ends at Humber Loop. It is supposed to be 50% of the service with alternate cars running through to Long Branch. The infrequent 508 Lake Shore cars which operate to/from downtown via King in the peak periods are not included here.
In Weeks 1-3, the amount of short turning east of Humber is evident from the differences in cars/hour values for Triller (east of Roncesvalles) and Humber Loop. Counts for Long Branch are generally close to those for Royal York (with the wide and irregular headways on this part of the route, a one-hour window at one location will not “count” the same cars as at another some distance away).
In Week 4, as in the east end, the severity of short-turning drops somewhat. In Week 5, there is no data shown for Triller because all of the service was diverting via King.
On weekend afternoons, short-turning at Kipling reduces the level of service operating through to Long Branch.
On Tuesdays, the charts shows an anomaly with more service at Long Branch than at Royal York. This was caused by data from Tuesday, November 1 when a bus shuttle operated on the outer end of the route providing a regular, fairly frequent service that persisted for several hours after streetcar service was restored. This caused the vehicles/hour count at Long Branch to be higher than would normally be seen, especially when both services were operating. (I left this in as an example of the danger of looking at “standard” analyses without trying to understand factors that could produce distortion in the “average” results.)
As with east end data, there is a caveat that these are averages that mask the effects of individual days and of uneven headways within each hour.
The Regularity of Blended Services
Some readers have commented about the unevenness of headways that supposedly blend at Humber Loop eastbound. More generally, it is fairly common to see cars from short turns “blend” into the service unevenly spaced within the gap they supposedly are filling.
To get a sense of this, I took the data from Saturday, November 7 westbound at Greenwood and eastbound at Roncesvalles and separated it by the origin point of each trip. If, for example, cars from Humber Loop consistently showed a short headway, this would indicate that they were always pulling out right behind a through car from Long Branch. A similar consideration would apply to short turn cars leaving Woodbine Loop.
For the purpose of measuring the headways, I used points where, if someone were actually managing the service, there was an opportunity to space the cars directly in front of the carhouses they pass. (At Russell Carhouse (Connaught westbound) traffic is light, and a car holding for time could easily be passed by traffic. At Roncesvalles Carhouse, an eastbound streetcar does not block through traffic on The Queensway.) No such effort is visible in the data.
501_20111107_Westbound Origins Headways
501_20111107_Eastbound Origins Headways
In these plots, the vertical position of each dot represents the headway of one car, and the horizontal position is the time. The colour/shape of the dot indicates the origin of the trip.
There is no real pattern to any of these data except for the onset of short-turning in the afternoon when running times are shorter than required. The headways of cars, regardless of their origin, are scattered over a wide range. Sometimes people will see a Humber car carrying a short headway, other times a Long Branch car. Fairly large gaps compared to scheduled service are not unusual as are pairs of cars entering the most congested part of the route together.
Westbound from Neville and Woodbine, there is no pattern to the spacing between vehicles.
This shows quite clearly that the primary effect of short-turning is to get cars back on time, not to fill gaps in service and provide regularly spaced vehicles for riders. The width of the “cloud” of data points also shows quite clearly how badly the TTC misses keeping all of its service within a three-minute band of a target headway.
I will return to these metrics in future articles looking at more recent time periods.
Steve Munro 
I don’t see any data for where westbound Humber cars versus Long Branch cars are short-turned. Assuming your data includes run numbers, it would be interesting to see, at a simplest level, where and how many Humber cars short-turned versus the same data for Long Branch cars. (Runs 30 and up are Humber cars.)
Back in the bad old days of “fix the 501”, westbound Long Branch cars could turn anywhere: Shaw, Roncesvalles, Humber, Kipling. Currently, at least in my evening peak riding, the only short-turn is at Kipling, and it’s fortunately very rare.
This might indicate that the majority of short-turned cars westbound are Humber cars, but it would be interesting to see the data.
In the east end, all cars theoretically go to Neville. It may be that, if the policy is to try to run Long Branch cars right out to Long Branch in the west end, that subroute is tidied up by being short-turned in the east end more than Humber cars. So more Humber cars would pull out of Neville loop than Long Branch cars.
Since, as far as I know, the two branches of the Queen car operate independently — a Humber car remains a Humber car, and would not change to a Long Branch car at some point — there could be a tacit route split going on: Humber cars being preferentially short-turned while westbound, making it an east-end service, and Long Branch cars being preferentially short-turned while eastbound, making it a west-end service.
Steve: This analysis will require a bit of work in part because of the way my programs handle the data now. At times, the relationship between run number and vehicle number is rather fluid because of step back/forward practices. However, riders see vehicles, not run numbers, and tracking vehicle movements gives a better sense of what is going on than tracking run numbers. I will look at a mechanism to identify which sub-route a vehicle is on to split out the short turn activity.
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Steve, the effects of short turning are not shown on this data. If you are a rider heading to Neville Park, two trams short turning at Coxwell are useless to you. By the time the non short turn tram arrives, it might be fill to the brim. Short turning might make the number looks nice, but the effect on the ground is quite substantial especially in inclement weather.
This is the case with the police too. Officers goes for the street level dealers because they are easier to convict and make their statistics look better. The big drug kingpins are usually left alone as those cases are harder to solve.
What we need is to give route supervisors the authority to order skipping stops. This way capacity on the line is not reduced. If there is a wolf pack of trams on Queen St east bound on Yonge, it can certainly skip Yonge Street and drop passengers off at Victoria instead. In addition, we need gap trams stored on loops throughout the city. This way, the extra trams can run filling in service where needed.
Finally, on street route supervisors must be given the same powers as Toronto Police. This way, they can stop traffic if neccessary to ensure that the trams run on time. Remember air traffic controllers have the authority to order airport diversions and route changes to any civilian aircraft. So, stopping traffic on King St to ensure that the trams can turn is quite reasonable.
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Steve comments,
Thanks, that will be interesting. Based on my experience, I would venture to guess that 90% of the cars short-turned westbound at Roncesvalles would be Humber cars.
Actually, two of the three “short-turns” I’ve experienced in the past month had nothing to do with route management, but rather were mechanical issues. One streetcar went out of service eastbound at Humber; the other dumped us on the day of the big snowstorm westbound at Claremont because the rear door treadles were going nuts. The Queen car being the primary home of the troublesome ALRVs, mechanical issues do happen.
On that topic, will the TTC actually be able to start retiring ALRVs this year, as I believe was the most recent fleet plan? I haven’t heard of the new streetcars moving much under their own power yet, and nothing about any ventures out on the streets.
Steve: Since my last reply, I have thought of a much simpler way to identify “Long Branch” cars that will simplify sorting out which type of car turns where, and so you should see supplementary info on this thread soon.
As for the ALRVs, my big concern is that the TTC’s rollout plan for new cars starts on CLRV routes although it is the CLRVs they plan to keep the longest. I am not sure they have thought through their fleet plan.
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Benny Cheung wrote:
This is a huge issue! If the TTC gets two or three short turns in a row, then the first non-short turn car is going to be full.
Skipping stops is only applicable if someone does not want to get off at the stop being skipped – although in most cases this would not be a big deal. As for storing trams, only some loops will offer this ability – the only ones I can think of are Long Branch and Humber (Humber has both the ex-507 Long Branch loop, as well as a second track on the loop for cars turning at Humber). Other loops are used during the day the last time I checked and do not necessarily have storage tracks.
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There is a danger in using run number analysis-you need the run guides to accurately do it. Weekends have runs that will do both trips, and some boards will have dailies that do this.
Streetcars do have 3 standby gap buses available for all routes. Currently there are only two off street loops to store standby cars — Wolseley and the Victoria/Dundas “Olympic” turn. Spadina loop could be used once returned to service, however this is already the location of one of the bus standbys.
The new LFLRVs may not be in service until next March — the 3rd prototype will be the first to see Toronto streets.
Steve, does the data reflect the 501 trippers and the SAC extra cars? These may bump up the numbers at the ends showing greater gaps in the middle.
Steve: Any vehicle (bus or streetcar) that is identifying itself to CIS as being on route “501” is included.
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Benny Cheung wrote:
This needs an official policy change, as this is very ingrained in the “TTC way of thinking”. While it is true that this is only applicable if someone does not want to get off at the stop being skipped, as pointed out by TorontoStreetcars, it can go a long way towards improving things. Under current policy, if someone complains about a vehicle that did not stop for them, the operator is called in to explain why. If they explain that their vehicle was packed full and no one wanted off at that stop, they are told that they must make the stop, open the door and explain to the people at the stop that there is no room for them. No kidding, this actually happens.
TTC management simply does not want to receive the complaints and then have to do something about it, and this has to change.
The TTC should take a page from the Canadian Broadcast Standards Association: the CBSA receives many complaints about things people had an issue with on television. Most of these complaints are about things that fall into the association’s guidelines (such as strong language being allowed after 9 pm), and their response is a standard message about the broadcast conforming to their guidelines. If the TTC had an official policy that permitted skipping stops, that would be their reply to complaints.
If they really want to reduce the number of complaints, they could embark on a public education program when such a new policy is brought in. Heck, if they can spend the money putting up posters to tell the public about the arrival of the TR subway cars, surely they can do the same for a policy change about skipping stops when a vehicle is full. Combine it with a policy to disallow short-turning a vehicle that follows a vehicle ordered to skip stops, and I suspect the public would be more accepting.
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So any vehicle that is logged on as a standby 705 or as a shuttle 805 would not be included as not scheduled service that nextbus could see.
Steve: That is correct. Unless the operator changes the route to the one actually being operated, it’s invisible. This is also an issue for line management.
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Based on what I’ve observed in NextBus on eastbound 503 and 504 buses heading eastbound in PM Peak out of downtown, they are changing the route to the one actually being operated – some of the time at least.
Steve: Based on the number of bus fleet numbers I see in the streetcar route data, I suspect that most of the time this is true.
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Even if the operator changes log on to a route, CIS has to force the system to track car or bus as a schedule vehicle before it shows up and is tracked.
Steve: Yes, that is one of the peculiarities of NextBus. Because it is a “predictive” system, it has to have an underlying schedule assigned to a tracked vehicle so that it knows where the vehicle is supposedly going. This also affects predicted departure times at terminals. It’s a rather odd design, I think, and will be especially troublesome if there is ever a change to running on headways, not schedules.
One change they were working on some time ago for Washington, DC, I think, was an interface with the vehicle so that the actual destination selection on the route sign would be reported as part of the data stream. This would allow predictions to tell you that a Queen car, for example, was headed for Shaw, not for its scheduled destination of Humber. The CIS hardware is so old that it has no capacity to interface with new data streams. (As I understand it, just getting the GPS info in was a bit of a stretch). This change is obviously dependent on vehicles having digital signs from which the code for the current display can be extracted.
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With the migration towards fully digital ‘roll signs’, I expect it would be fairly easy to implement a “FULL” message to show on the car in lieu of the destination. To anyone standing on the street, the destination is immaterial if they won’t be able to board the car. This communicates the intended message without the operator needing to stop and spell it out for the people at the curb. Also, I could picture that incorporating a “next [501] in XXX minutes” as an intermittent replacement for “Full” or “Not in service” would be beneficial, though I’m not certain the hardware has this capability.
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Funnily enough after I posted yesterday, I walked out the door and saw (and just missed) a 504 bus at Jarvis – presumably a standby gap bus, with a streetcar a minute or two later. Looking at the data on transee, I could see that it was using the same run number as a streetcar a few cars behind.
Interestingly, the streetcar behind overtook it near Parliament Street, and finally arrived at Broadview station about 4 minutes ahead of the bus (or at least that is how far behind the streetcar Transee said it was when we arrived at the station). It would appear having to constantly change lanes to dodge parked cars (it was just after 6 pm) makes the bus slower than a streetcar.
Steve: Buses slower than streetcars? Surely you jest!
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I remember an article in the Star after the University Subway opened that said the average speed of the Bay Bus was less than the Dupont Car that it replaced.
I have also been looking at the average speed from the service summaries and it appears that street cars have a higher average operating speed than buses in the old city. The one thing I don’t know is if the layover time is included in the running times and average speed.
Anyone who thinks that buses will travel at higher speeds than streetcars in the city proper has not spent much time riding them.
Steve: Scheduled speeds from service summaries:
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Steve: Scheduled speeds from service summaries:
I am sure there is more to the decrease in speed than just bus vs streetcar. For example, between 1954 and 1974 the number of cars in Toronto must have grown susbtantially since the population doubled.
Steve: But those cars have not all been driving on Bay Street. You really cannot count population and auto growth in the outer 416 that was farmland in 1954 with today’s conditions, or even with 1974, the end of my series. In general, the TTC has found that running times when buses (even trolley buses) replaced streetcars went up and speed went down. It’s a simple fact of life given the different positions on the road each vehicle type has, the vehicle capacities, and acceleration characteristics under heavy load.
[And just for reference, I was born in Toronto in 1948 and grew up in North Toronto. There were farms only a few km north of my house, and the intersection of Lawrence & Vic Park was a nice spot way out in the country to go to watch stars at night. By the late 1960s, there were still sheep grazing along the eastern reaches of Finch Avenue. Meanwhile, the cordon counts for auto traffic into downtown have not changed in decades because all of the growth is by transit.]
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From Transit Toronto
Is it a policy of the TTC to convert a route to streetcars only if:
-passenger volumes require streetcar capacity, or
-space is available for a private right-of-way?
I was thinking that the TTC would only convert to streetcars only if it would improve service, in capacity or speed/mobility. Converting to streetcars when the capacity is not needed isn’t an improvement in mobility if no private-right-of-way is also installed, since streetcars are more prone to being blocked by obstacles than buses.
But nfitz and Robert Wightman’s post suggests that streetcars, even without a right-of-way, are faster than the bus service equivalent.
So is Jarrett Walker wrong in part when he claims that “If you replace a bus with a streetcar on the same route, and make no other improvements, nobody will be able to get anywhere any faster than they could before”?
Steve: Re TTC policy, the answer essentially is “yes”. As for bus to streetcar conversions, there might be a slight improvement in speed, but this would be offset by wider headways. Also, it is important to remember that the streetcar-to-bus conversions were in the “old” city where streets operate effectively as one lane each way due to parking and loading for much of the day. The situation would be different on a wide street in the suburbs.
Re the Coxwell car, a much more basic issue is that the loop at Coxwell Station is not designed for streetcar traffic.
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Would an increase in speed still be realised if streetcars replaced buses on a 1:1 ratio?
Also, I wonder if forcing buses to stay in the centre lanes, as if they were streetcars, would improve speed.
My comments are in the context of downtown two-lane/direction streets.
Steve: Possibly, but neither is going to happen. The whole point of buses is to get out of the way of autos. They are not designed for loading from pavement level.
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In the UCRS Newsletter of the day, it was reported that
(That’s from memory, when I read the bound volumes in the City Hall Library in the late 60s). It suggested that the problem was that the bus pulled off to the curb to load and then had to fight back into traffic while the streetcar just held its position.
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Mikey says:
The short answer is it depends. If you replace a 15 minute bus service with a 15 minute street car service the answer is probably no, because there is not enough transit service to impact the flow of traffic. In the old City of Toronto however with the TTC’s service levels and the narrowness of the streets it is a different answer.
In the US they are building street car lines, not LRT but street car to operate on a 15 minute headway. They do his because they got federal transit grants, at least they did before sequestering, that paid almost all of the capital costs. There is also the belief that the fact that there are tracks means that the line will not be abandoned in the near future. I believe that it is these types of service Jarrett is talking about. Also street cars had double front and rear doors which speed up loading.
I too was born and raised in North Toronto, 1946 and lived on Davisville Avenue between Mount Pleasant and Yonge St. My buddies and I used to ride our bikes out to the end of Eglinton and camp in the Don Valley, 0.5 km east of Brentcliffe. Our other favourite pass time was to play in the garbage dump at the south end of Bayview behind the grocery store on Moore Park. Greenwood Yard was also a garbage dump. Yes the city has grown. And until Eglinton was extended across the Don Valley you had to go down to the Danforth or up to Sheppard to get to Victoria Park.
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Hi Steve:-
Steve: “Buses slower than streetcars? Surely you jest!”
I recall the older members of the Streetcar museum relating stories of fantrips etc. One was a trip, near the end of it’s 40 year life, on a Small Witt that was traveling up the Bathurst Street hill. They passed a brand new bus from a standing start at Davenport and left it in their dust. It could not keep up.
Too, the story about every bus being late on the Dupont route when these low class vehicles replaced 15 to 40 year old streetcars one for one on the same schedule, is one that I’ve related many times to bus proponents. They think that I’ve made it up until they hear why.
Dennis
Steve: Two other conversions, in both cases initially to trolley coaches, also ran into problems with running time: Junction and Mt. Pleasant. Neither route was able to sustain the streetcar schedule because of the extra time to pull in to stop and slower loading, even with comparable vehicle performance of electric buses vs streetcars. The diesels that replaced them were even worse. Mind you, a related problem was that on the shorter routes, the ops still expected to stretch their legs at each end of the run, and this took proportionately more time.
Terminal layovers are a major problem for TTC scheduling because they have always resisted putting guaranteed break times in the schedule. Some schedules have “recovery time”, as it is called, but not at any guaranteed proportion of driving time. Usually, this is simply to make the round trip come out to an even multiple of the headway, especially on branching routes.
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I think what they should do, is when a driver gets more then 3 minutes behind, they should radio control, state that they are behind, and why (traffic, weather, 4 wheelers playing bumper cars), control would have a supervisor call the driver back. Bus/Streetcar drivers aren’t morons, they know when they are behind schedule, they should be able to call control, who either tells them what to do, or sends a supervisor out, to get things straightened out.
That supervisor should be able to tell the operator to “NVP”, the operator can then change their sign to “Next Vehicle Please”, and go express until they get caught up. When they are caught up, the operator informs control that they are returning to regular service.
Steve: It’s a bit more complex than that. First off, the TTC claims that its target is to maintain headways, not schedules, and this requires spacing out service. CIS control can see that there are packs running back and forth on routes, but once these form, there is little evidence of any attempt to space out the service again. Large gaps, much greater than the TTC’s 3-minutes either side of headway, routinely appear and travel the length of routes. This is an abdication of the responsibility to manage service quality, and a blind assumption that if only they can keep vehicles on time, everything else will work out. It doesn’t.
Later this week, I will be publishing an analysis of the Dufferin Bus which has recently been in the news and in some exchanges in social media. It’s not very pretty.
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I read your analysis with interest. Looking at the east end of the line, it takes an average 35-40 minutes to get from Neville to the financial district. With access time (walking from home, waiting for the streetcar, getting to the office) the 8 km commute might take almost an hour. That is without overcrowding, bunching and short turns.
Managing the line will address all the issues above and reduce the waiting time. However, the most basic problem will remain: the streetcars in Toronto are slow. The speed is constrained by the traffic speed on the street. The 50 minutes trip by transit vs. 25 minutes by car won´t convince the drivers to take the streetcar (that will mean an hour less a day to spend with their families).
We need to come up with creative solutions how to speed up transit. Transit priority signals, removing a few stops and all door loading can help. But that won´t drastically affect transit speed. Almost certainly a dedicated lane will be required through the most congested section of the route to bring the speeds up to an acceptable level.
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